With Their Cameras on Their Sleeves

You know those days when you realize how woefully uninformed you are about a whole swath of culture? Well Tuesday was one of those for me.

On March 21, at the Soho Apple store, I caught the ninth in a series of presentation by photographers from NYCPhotobloggers.org (henceforth referred to by their own abbreviation NYCPB). Am I the only one who was previously unaware of this group? I sort of hope so, because it's great.

The idea is simple: Get a bunch of local photobloggers together so they can help each other, educate each other, support each other, and publicize for each other. And the execution is admirable, in the way you would expect from a bunch of technology-savvy New Yorkers: Nice, clean website including Yahoo Group postings, Flickr Group scrolling pics, Del.icio.us tags, and thoughtful posts from regular contributors.

But I wouldn't have appreciated the true genius of this collective had I not made it to their Apple store presentation. Again, it was a simple affair. Organizer Jake Dobkin introduced the featured bloggers, who presented their photos and took a few questions. Then Photojojo gave away a cool little tripod and bloggers Matthew Purcell and Raul Gutierrez gave out prints to lucky audience members.

At first it seems like a strange idea...inviting people to an event where they sit and view websites on a (huge, beautiful) screen. But it's also an elegantly simple response to one of the most pressing questions of the digital age: Where and how do the online world and the "real" world converge?

One of the major concerns many (often older) people have about the internet is that its benefits are hard to grasp--literally. We used to think of a product as something you could hold in your hand. Now it is simply something you can view (if you're lucky) on your computing device of choice. Notice that this is also something that makes members of the non-digital generations so uncomfortable about digital photography. Photographs used to be things you could touch and manipulate physically. Now they are just very sophisticated strings of zeros and ones.

Alright, but what does that have to do with Tuesday's NYCPB event? Well, primarily, it proved that digital media is not inherently isolating. It has long drawn people together in virtual meetings spaces; but this was the first time I had experienced that community coming together in a physical space. Wouldn't it be fun if public viewings of websites became the next big thing? The whole point of the internet is that it can be accessed by anyone from anywhere, but why does that have to be a necessarily individual endeavor? Navigating the web is all about personal choice, so it was somehow refreshing to sit back and have someone else decide for me about when to push the "page forward" button or to navigate to another page.

And it was a great way to increase visibility for the featured sites. Considering that I receive at least 20 links a day to sites I "have to check out," it was wonderful to be able to put a voice and a demeanor, not just a face, to the personalities behind those sites. Each presenter had a different approach to photography, a different relationship with the medium, a different reason for being out there in the first place. But their passion and enthusiasm united them, along with a few key themes: the way having a camera in your hand forces you to slow down and look at things carefully, the energetic and international responses their photographs had evoked, and, of course, New York.

Whether it was the subject of their pictures, or just evident in their sensibilities, the city these photobloggers live and work in played a huge role in Tuesday's event. The designers of the Photobloggers.org Network were smart to keep the groups locally based (in cities like Paris, Los Angeles, and Barcelona). At first enamored with the endless online community, I'm now moving into a period of slight frustration with its limitations, its ability to connect us with millions, but only so long as we accept a new, watered-down definition of "connect." So to find a group that "lives" online, but converses, shoots, and presents in my city--well, that's exciting. They've taken a new medium (the internet) and used it to reinvent an old idea (the artist's collective)--and there's nothing simple about that.

~Miki Johnson

(Photo: By Sam Horine, who is part of a small crew of Brooklynites who photograph the borough's urban decay)

Comments

[avisualsociety]

i thought the photoblogger event was somewhat interesting...the parts that i could hear. those people did not know how to speak in front of a crowd.

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